What a Firkin’ Life — David Bruce’s Life in Beer
In one corner of the 17th Century barn at Hawkridge Distillers, under a fairy-tale web of timber beams, a young man is making coffee from a bag of beans on a proper barista machine. Espressos. Cup after cup after tiny cup, tipping them one at a time into a large barrel of vodka, clicking a counter… 481… 482… until he gets to 1,000.
David Bruce, on a visit to this, his latest business investment, which specialises in bespoke spirits (in this case a premixed espresso martini that will be bottled for a group of wedding venues) is gripped with wonder as he watches. He’s as wired as though he’s just gulped down all those coffees himself.
David Bruce OBE—to give him his full title—has just turned 77. I’ve known him for 40 years, and he hasn’t changed a bit. A little thinner on top perhaps, and a little thicker round the middle since the knees went and he had to stop running.
In 1981 he completed the inaugural London Marathon in three hours and 16 minutes. At the time, he was two years into growing the Firkin brewpub chain that would make his fortune.
Photography by Sean McEmerson
You can tell his mind is racing still with the entrepreneurial energy that battered down bureaucratic barriers to build his brewpub empire back in the 1980s. The chain that endeared him to the American pioneers of craft beer, that kept him launching pubs for decades and continues to drive his support for entrepreneurs in which he sees, perhaps, a glimpse of himself.
“I’m still fizzing with enthusiasm for small entrepreneurial businesses, and I love being involved in them,” he says. “I’m attracted by the challenge. I cannot resist it.”
He hands his card to the young barista, who it turns out runs his own fledgling firm, Brew Crew Coffee, and invites him to get in touch. It also turns out that the coffee-maker’s name is Iain Bruce. You couldn’t make it up.
Nor could you make up David Bruce’s story, told in his business memoir, The Firkin Saga, which was published in July 2025. A business memoir is one of those books that, at the end of each chapter, lists the lessons learned, for the edification of budding entrepreneurs, at the end of each chapter. Not that you could imagine anyone precisely following Bruce’s course, a life of hard-nosed dealing always leavened by comedy.
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This was serious business. In 1988 he sold the dozen-strong Firkin chain to Midsummer Leisure, a company born out of the Campaign for Real Ale’s dabbling in pubs, for £6.6 million.
““It was just my bonkers way to get off the dole.””
“I honestly didn’t do it to make any money,” he says. “There’s no great Bruce strategy. I’ve never done anything to make money. I’m not driven by an avaricious need. It was just my bonkers way to get off the dole.”
Trained by Courage in the days when brewers liked to give their promising young recruits a taste of every aspect of the business, “I knew how to brew, and I knew how to run pubs,” he says. “And the time was right. Big brewers were selling off failed pubs and nobody else wanted them.”
Bruce was broke. But he knew people, managed to sell the idea to banks and, crucially, secured cheap loans from brewers in exchange for selling their lagers—5% interest at a time when the going rate was 19%.
With the exception of Bristol’s Fleece & Firkin, the only site outside London, each brewpub was an instant success with the public and tapped into a surging demand for cask beer—something Bruce had noticed during a stint with Yorkshire brewer, Theakston’s.
“When I was there, I saw that CAMRA was doing a good job of promoting cask conditioned ale and our sales were growing. But CAMRA didn’t like me because I used malt extract,” he adds. “All they did was criticise. We were in the Good Beer Guide only for the other brewer’s beers we sold, never our own.”
“In fact, nearly everyone thought I was wrong before they saw the pubs were rammed.”
What’s clear is that beer was not the only ingredient in the successful formula. “We had a sense of fun, and young, enthusiastic staff. There was a Firkin culture, what I call professional amateurism. It was manic, off-the-wall.”
Bruce had a knack with branding, too. The wordplay on ‘firkin’ that accompanied every pub opening and printed on T-shirts (he was a pioneer of what today is called ‘merch’,) seems to go too far, the puns too painfully contorted, but it worked.
A slogan for the Phoenix & Firkin, my favourite Firkin, is still lodged in my brain like a shard of wartime shrapnel: “Phoenix my pint I’ll Firkin thump him”. You get the idea.
The Phoenix also exemplified the lengths Bruce would go to pursue his unlikely vision. Housed in the gutted Denmark Hill railway station, it stretched precariously across the tracks. Bruce had to reinforce the floor to prevent revellers falling into the path of an oncoming train, and the planning permissions and the licensing was, as you can imagine, a nightmare. But Bruce did it, complete with a little engine running around the top of the bar.
In every respect, this was something others could not replicate. The brand was sold and sold again, each new owner watering down the concept until it was no more than a name. Should Bruce have sold? The memoir includes a balance sheet of pros and cons, but these big decisions are always already made before they are rationalised.
Today he has a briefer, more brutal, explanation: “I got bored of what I’d created… And I was knackered.”
The numbers were stacking up against him, too. “We still owned 90% of the business but that meant we had a massive level of debt, £3 million. I could see the Monopolies & Mergers report that led to the Beer Orders would mean more freehouses on the market and more competition. The banks were getting nervous. It was a matter of flog it or float it. We couldn’t carry on.”
Finally free of money worries once the Firkins were sold, Bruce launched the charity providing barge holidays for disabled people that earned him his OBE, but it wasn’t long before he was back in beer and making an impact, this time on a global scale.
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The American connection had been made as early as 1981 when Charlie Papazian, then president of the American Homebrewers Association, visited London to find out how a Firkin brewpub worked. He visited the Frog, Goose and Fox in that order. The following year he invited Bruce to speak at the organisation’s first conference, in Boulder, Colorado.
““Having just opened the Frog & Firkin, Bruce hopped onto the stage in a Kermit costume.””
Having just opened the Frog & Firkin, Bruce hopped onto the stage in a Kermit costume. In the decades to come he would appear in public as a Beefeater, as Dick Whittington, a Christmas fairy and more. The book explains this as good PR, but you can’t help feeling he just likes dressing up.
On this occasion the frivolity drew attention to a serious opportunity for the embryonic craft beer movement. Colorado was about to become the first state to ditch the law that banned the production and retail of beer on the same site. Bruce provided inspiration for a wave of brewpubs that would drive the expansion of craft beer.
And not just inspiration. Bruce designed and built breweries, through his company Brewel, which sold its services around the world, including the States.
On one of his many trips across the Atlantic, in 1994, he visited Manhattan Brewing where he met its brewer, the future legend of the beer world, Garrett Oliver. The business was heading for bankruptcy and Oliver was thinking of joining a new start-up—but it needed funding.
“He introduced me to the founders of Brooklyn Brewery,” Bruce continues. “They were keen homebrewers but thank god they had someone like Garrett who understood brewing on a commercial scale. That was crucial. And on that basis six Brits, including me, invested £100,000 each.”
More deals followed. Bruce formed another company, Brew Securities, to funnel British money into US craft brewing, becoming a catalyst for its expansion.
“I was a bit sniffy about craft beer then,” he admits. “I’m a real ale brewer, sceptical about beers tasting of apricots and rhubarb. But they were absolutely right. They’re home brewers at heart, there’s a huge passion and fervour, and they’re little guys like me.”
““There are 10,000 craft breweries in the States now...Sometimes I wonder, did it start with me in London?””
“There are 10,000 craft breweries in the States now and the movement has gone global. Sometimes I wonder, did it start with me in London?”
For a moment he looks uncomfortable at the thought. Certainly, he hasn’t gone unrewarded. His most successful investment was a 10% stake in Elysian Brewery in 1995. He “forgot all about it” until, 20 years later, the owners sold to AB InBev and his initial $45,000 (£33,600) magically became $2.1 million (£1.6 million.)
“My most dreaded enemy,” Bruce calls the giant corporation that brought his windfall. “I have a pathological hatred of big brewers. Big corporations have different reasons for growing. I’ve never liked anything big, the establishment. I can’t help but be an entrepreneur.”
Bruce kept himself busy in Britain, too, founding a series of pub operations including Capital Pub Company and the City Pub Company with his great collaborator Clive Watson.
Not all were successful. He’s still plainly annoyed about his joint venture with Brakspear Brewery, Honeypot Inns, which fell apart even after he’d gone to the trouble of dressing up as a bee. Then there was West Berkshire Brewery.
Now under new owners and trading as Renegade, it’s a short drive from Hawkridge Distillers and Bruce suggests we go to the taproom for lunch. “If they don’t throw me out,” he half-jokes. “I haven’t been back since it collapsed four years ago.”
Far from being thrown out, the former chairman is greeted warmly by several members of staff who’ve kept their jobs. It’s obvious they like him. People are drawn to Bruce’s energy, his good humour, his genuine interest in them.
Drinking a stout–he’s a dark beer man—he admires the vast modern space he created, the brewery and packaging lines gleaming behind a glass wall that stretches almost the whole length of the former farm building.
As for today’s craft beer market, he shrugs at what is, perhaps, the inevitable. “A lot of people have got on the bandwagon. Most of the beers have the same flavour and big pub companies are doing deals with big brewers like they were before the MMC report.”
An ironic strand runs through Bruce’s career. The determined little guy needed corporate capital, from the loan-ties that fuelled the Firkins to the funds that founded craft and made him a millionaire.
“It’s a good point,” he says. “I have used big business. I couldn’t have done it otherwise. I was only trained to brew and run pubs. I don’t have financial skills. Everything’s been a battle, but I like fighting and proving the experts wrong again and again.
“In 2016 this, where we’re sitting, was a shed full of cow shit. Look at it now!” He gestures towards the smart and comfortable modern taproom. “You’ve got to have a vision. I want to keep having fun, keep doing things, and keep investing in interesting people. There are too many boring farts around.”
“But,” he pauses, about to drop the largest understatement ever uttered: “I suppose I’m very unusual.”
